This invention relates to digital data processing means for locating words from a data base which are acceptable matches to a given word.
Digital data processing systems are known for locating a given word (i.e., a query word) in a data base. Various problems are encountered in finding a match between the query word and the data base. For example, the misspellings are often encountered either in the data base or the query word. Accordingly, if a comparison is made for an exact match between the query word and the words of the data base, words which are misspellings of the query word will not be located in the data base.
Additionally, the data base may contain inflections of the query word which should be returned to the user because they are acceptable inflections of the query word. Examples of inflections are plurals, possessives, gerunds, and regular tenses of verbs. These inflections will not be an exact spelling of the query word and therefore an exact match would not be suitable for locating the inflections in the data base.
Various techniques have also been proposed for separating words into stems and suffixes. Proposals have also been made for recognizing inflections for English and foreign language words. For example, the book entitled Computer Data Base Organization, printed by Prentice-Hall, discloses a program product called STAIRS with Thesaurus option which has inflection recognition capabilities for English and foreign languages. See page 562 and the related discussion. However, this product does not appear to efficiently, if at all, handle misspellings, alternate spellings, and garbles between the query word and the words of the data base.